Stripe employs 8,198 people as of December 2025, up from 5,857 in 2023, a 40% jump in two years, based on Revelio Labs tracking. The company set a public target of about 10,000 staff by the end of 2025. This post covers Stripe’s headcount by year, layoffs, department and office breakdowns, salaries, and how it stacks up against PayPal, Block, and Adyen. Stripe Employee Statistics – TL;DR Stripe has 8,198 tracked employees as of December 2025, per Revelio Labs, against a company target ...

By AI Platform’s Model Runtime team and Inference team Introduction Most organizations consume LLMs through hosted APIs. Netflix went further — we run the full stack ourselves, from model deployment through inference, inside our existing production environment rather than a separate ML silo. Some of those decisions weren’t obvious, and a few revealed their trade-offs only under production load. This post focuses on the choices where alternatives were seriously considered: engine select...

0.0 Context Setting It’s Wednesday, July 15th 2026 in Portland, Oregon, and the England football team have just finished being the archetypal England football team. (Only it’s not. Now it’s Thursday.) 0.1 Events: How People Work, Live! ... with Erika Hall Short version: it’s your last call to register to attend How People Work, Live! ... with Erika Hall for Friday, 17 July, at 11am Pacific. Following last week’s How People Work with Matt Jukes, I’m super excited to have...

A few years ago, a friend of mine was stuck. He needed to quickly process over a hundred high-quality images according to a complicated sequence. He was using Photoshop, but it was going to take him days. Initially, he asked for my help, could I do the manual labor? I spent 15 minutes writing a script with ImageMagick that processed all the images in seconds, but in a completely automated way. When my kids were young, instead of helping them study algebra and grammar, I wrote small JavaScript ...

MELBOURNE, Fla. (July 16, 2026) — L3Harris Technologies (NYSE: LHX) and Shield AI have completed the first flight test of the electromagnetic battle management ecosystem known as  Distributed Spectrum Collaboration and Operations  (DiSCO™) with Shield AI’s  Hivemind  mission-autonomy software. The flight demonstration, performed on an L3Harris Green Wolf, marks a significant milestone in autonomous electronic warfare following a simulated test in February 2026. Unmanned aircraft sys...

I’m very much a Moon person but I’ve written a bit about Mars over the years as well, highlighting a few key aspects about the red planet’s exploration which I thought aren’t discussed as much or in detail. NASA explores Mars A comparison of three generations of NASA Mars rovers. These are flight-spares inside NASA JPL's  Mars Yard  testing area. The Sojourner rover’s twin is front and center, a Mars Exploration Rover spare is on the left, and the Curiosity twin is on the right.  ...

Herman Chernoff passed away on July 6, 5 days after turning 103. Ravi Boppana wrote a guest post about Chernoff's life for his 100th birthday.  Let me talk about his most famous work, the Chernoff Bounds themselves. If you have a coin that will be heads with probability \(p\), and you flip it \(n\) times, the expected number of heads is \(pn\). Informally Chernoff bounds says that for large \(n\) the number of heads will be quite close to \(pn\) with an exponentially small probability ...

Suppose you pose the following problem to me: solve a large sparse linear system Ax=b , where A and b are public and x is unknown. Can I convince you that I have a good x without sending the whole vector? The answer turns out to be yes. I can solve the system by any method I like and send a proof whose validator uses only a few megabytes of memory, even when the solution has millions of entries. At one million unknowns my exact certificate was 779,326 bytes and the experimental flo...

It might shock you to know that I put in an order for a retrocomputer earlier this month. Alas, it’s not going as well as one may hope. After saving and searching for this specific machine for months, I eventually tracked one down in serviceable condition on a US store that ran on Shopify. I prefer buying from outside the US thesedays if I can, because their shipping prices are wild. It typically costs half as much to get something from the UK, despite it being further away. But something so...

I was born in the USA. Many tongues call me "American": Italian ( americano ), French ( Américain ), German ( Amerikaner ), Dutch ( Amerikaan ), Afrikaans ( Amerikaner ), Japanese ( アメリカ人, amerika-jin ), Filipino ( Amerikano ), Hebrew (אמריקני), Arabic (أمريكي), Portuguese ( americano ), Russian ( американец ), and Hindi ( अमरीकी, Amreeki ). I grew up in Southern California. Many of my friends were zeroeth-generation immigrants from Mexico. Weren't...

Every so often, I publish a blog post with a longer title. When this happens, sometimes the post title wraps onto a second line in my list of blog posts on my site home page. This was a tiny detail, but one that I would often notice. Last night, I brought the design to Front End Study Hall , and asked what I could do to make the text better aligned. For context, the following screenshot shows the grid of links on my home page, with one post, the post about an IndieWeb event in the Southeast Asi...

Anyone using Pop!_OS with Cosmic? I tried it when it was first released, but I looks like they've done a lot of dev work to it and it's improving all the time. Considering installing it again... Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email , or leave a comment . Anyone using Pop!_OS with Cosmic? I tried i...

Kevin sent me a link to this email from Linus Torvalds the other day, and I found that to be a great example of something that has been bothering me for a while now. It’s about AI—everything is about AI these days, so damn boring—and, more specifically, Linus’ position when it comes to the use of LLMs. What I find bothersome is the lack of any consideration for the moral and ethical implications of the technology itself. The justification for its use essentially boils down to “it...

A few weeks ago I decided to be bold and put out there that I had itches I wanted to scratch. It isn't something I normally do, as I usually reject myself before allowing others to do so. So, after the Wonders of Web Weaving podcast was published, I rejoiced online and said that I was grateful for how, in 2026, I'd experienced a couple of things for the first time: being an MC at a conference and being a guest on a podcast, and that I was keen for more. So I was invited to chat on the codebar ...

The Fourier series is a great tool for analyzing periodic functions. But what about functions that don’t repeat? We’ve seen that we can compute Fourier series for a non-periodic function defined on a finite interval, as long as we don’t care about its behavior beyond that interval. Let’s extend this idea to functions that never repeat; that is, non-periodic functions defined on the interval (-\infty,\infty) . Visualizing Fourier series for non-repeating functions To motivate...

I’m co-teaching a lesson for the Carpentries next week about the impact of LLMs on teaching. Here are a few things I’ve been reading to prepare: Barba2026 Lorena A. Barba and Laura Stegner: “The Conversational Exam: A Scalable Assessment Design for the AI Era”. https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10691 , 2026. Conversational exam (live coding + explanation in small groups) restores assessment validity against generative AI cheating; 58 students examined in 2 days; combines authentic pra...

The anonymous blogger Gwern recently completed a thirteen thousand word post called Human-like Neural Nets by Catapulting , in which he offers a theory about why LLMs don’t possess truly flexible human-like intelligence, and how we might train LLMs that do. Theories like this are entirely unremarkable: every crank researcher on the internet has a theory about how to crack AI. But Gwern is remarkable. Outside of OpenAI itself, Gwern is the earliest person to anticipate the potential of l...

It was 9 a.m. on a Thursday, and Martin Picard was watching his blood flow from an IV in his arm through a hole in the wall. He was sitting on a twin bed in a claustrophobic chamber less than a shoulder’s width from a stainless steel sink and porcelain toilet. Every hour over 24 hours, including while he slept, a nurse channeled blood from his arm to a research team next door; at each time point… Source It was 9 a.m. on a Thursday, and Martin Picard was watching his blood flow from an IV ...

Chinese AI lab Moonshot AI announced Kimi K3 this morning, describing it as their "most capable model to date, with 2.8 trillion parameters". It's currently available via their website and API, but an open weight release is promised "by July 27, 2026". Moonshot are calling this the first "open 3T-class model" (I guess they're rounding 2.8 trillion up to 3 trillion), taking the crown from DeepSeek's 1.6T v4 Pro . Their self-reported benchmarks have K3 mostly beating Claude Opus 4.8 max and...

When people think of legacy modernization, most folks aren't imagining the target environment will be Java 8. But this was the challenge facing Nik Malykhin when he needed to run a Java 1.5 codebase on today's hardware. His early use of LLMs gave plausible answers that did not hold up in the codebase. Progress came when he grounded the process in evidence, using AI to support analysis, validation in a stable Docker environment, and gradual refactoring protec...

Hello! I’ve been working on a Django site recently, and I decided to use SQLite as the database. When I was getting started with using SQLite as database for a website I read a bunch of blog posts about how it is totally fine to use SQLite in production for a small site and I think it is totally fine, but what I did not fully appreciate is that SQLite is still a database, databases are complicated, and I do not know a lot about operating databases. So here are a couple of small things I...

I enjoyed the busy city life in Melbourne for a few days, but soon the adventurer and nature seeker in me took over again. It so happens that one of the best road trips in the world is around the corner: The Great Ocean Road . It is also the world's largest war memorial, dedicated to soldiers killed during World War I. After a wonderful group trip in Rotorua , I was again looking to share the experience with other people. It didn't take long to gather our fellowship, which coincidentally con...

Julia Roberts? She was in that one movie with that guy, and the other one with the other guy, and like 100 more. Whatever. But she’s old news. Like all the other celebrity names I actually recognize, which isn’t a lot, but is some.  Just a minute ago a headline floated by: Person A is doing Thing with Person B, what will Person C think? I have no idea: Who the people are, their relationship or lack thereof, their various claims to fame. I do not possess any crumbs of context helping m...